Saturday, October 13, 2012

Life’s a
bit too busy to trawl up oddities from the depths of EEBO, so another post about a Jacobean
monument, one that I found remarkable. It’s a brass plaque in Shorwell church,
on the Isle of Wight. It (just maybe) conveys a double message – alongside the quite
sincere tribute-in-general, may be some hints of a more complicated story.

Top and
bottom of the plaque are these two texts, which tell the facts:

“To the remembrance
of the two most worthie and religious gentleweomen his late deare & loyall
wives Mrs Elizabeth Bampfield who died the VIIth of March 1615 having bin ye
mother of 15 hopefull children and Mrs Gartrude Percevall who died childless
the XXII of December 1619 was this monument consecrated by their loving &
sorrowfull Husband Barnabas Leigh Esq.”

I have
re-lineated the lines at the bottom:

Since
neither penne, nor pencill can set forth

Of these
two matchles wives the matchles worth

W’are
forc’t to cover in this silent tombe

The Praises
of a chast and fruitfull wombe:

And with
death’s sable vaile in darknes hide,

The ritch
rare virtues of a barren bride.

Sweet
saintlight paire of Soules, in whome did shine

Such models
of perfection fæminine,

Such Pietie,
love, zeale: That though we sinners

Their lives
have lost, yet still [them]selves are winners

For they
secure, heavens happiness inherit,

Whilst we lament
their losse, admire their merit.

In between
the two main texts, the pictorial part of the plaque shows the two women,
Elizabeth with her shoal of fifteen behind her, kneeling in primary and
secondary ranks by gender, the ten boys first, the girls behind. Her hand
touches the bared head of the eldest son. From the normal post-Reformation ‘depiction’
of God, ‘Jehovah’ in Hebrew letters, the divine command ‘Crescite’(‘Increase’)
shines down on the male children. Gartrude is of course on her own, but the 'Chi
Rho' symbol for Christ shines down on her.

Between the two women, a male gloved
hand breaks the word ‘Sorrow=full’ in the memorial inscription, and is itself
inscribed ‘vae soli’ – ‘woe alone’. The hand supports, with the left hand of
Elizabeth and Gartrude’s right hand, a ring, with the motto ‘tres conjunxit’ (‘three
joined, coupled’) around a heart, the heart with the motto ‘Unum’ – ‘one’. A
chain descends from the ring to a death’s death (‘divisit’ – ‘it divided’),
but, in a nice detail, both women have a foot, rather jauntily, on the death’s
head, as a modest expression of their triumphant ascent to eternal life.

As is quite
normal in portraits of the time, text is just about as important as depiction,
and we have plenty more to read. Barnabas Leigh had searched his Bible for
texts suitable to honour both his wives. Divine light shines on Elizabeth, and
she gets “Sicut Plantulae Olivarum ps128” as one of her mottoes (on the scroll
to her left), and above her head, “sicut vitis frugifera”. Both are from
Psalm 128, verse 3: “Thy wife shall
be as a fruitful vine by the sides of
thine house: thy children like olive
plants round about thy table.”

1 Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into
singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are
the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord.

2 Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch
forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and
strengthen thy stakes;

3 For thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the
left; and thy seed shall inherit the Gentiles, and make the desolate cities to
be inhabited.

4 Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be
thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame: for thou shalt forget the
shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any
more.

5 For thy Maker is thine husband; the Lord of
hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the
whole earth shall he be called.

6 For the Lord hath called thee as a woman
forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused,
saith thy God.

7 For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with
great mercies will I gather thee.

The other text for Gartrude is more interesting – but really
sets a challenge about where to stop an interpretation. One notices that she is
depicted pointing to the text with her free hand, in a balancing gesture to
Elizabeth’s hand blessing her eldest son. Gartrude’s text is “An non ego melior
tibi quam decem filii 1 Sam 18”.

This takes us to the start of the First Book of Samuel – the
text is the last part of this extract:

1 [Elkanah] had two wives; the name of the one was Hannah,
and the name of the other Peninnah: and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had
no children …

… 4 And when the time was that Elkanah offered, he gave
to Peninnah his wife, and to all her sons and her daughters, portions:

5 But unto Hannah he gave a worthy portion; for he
loved Hannah: but the Lord had shut up her womb.

6 And her adversary also provoked her sore, for to make
her fret, because the Lord had shut up her womb.

7 And as he did so year by year, when she went up to
the house of the Lord, so she provoked her; therefore she wept, and did
not eat.

8 Then said Elkanah her husband to her, Hannah, why
weepest thou? and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved? am not I
better to thee than ten sons?”

The
Bible story is one of an awful rivalry over fertility between two wives:
Peninnah/Elizabeth producing children, Hannah/Gartrude weeping, and not eating,
always under the lash of her rival’s provoking tongue.

Obviously,
Barnabas Leigh did not, like Elkanah, have two wives at once. He had found the
perfect text for Gartrude in the splendid promises made by the Lord himself in
Psalm 54. A further text was gratuitous: he could have quoted twice from the
one Psalm, as was done with Elizabeth. Was it the intention to indicate that
Elizabeth’s success in multiple births (and how eloquent of the uncertainties
of child survival at the time is that regular locution about “hopefull
children”) oppressed Gartrude as second wife? Out of a Bible context rich in
implications (if implications were meant), chosen for the plaque was that
strong affirmation of a husband’s love “An non ego melior tibi
quam decem filii” – ‘am not
I better to thee than ten sons?’

Look
at how the artist depicted the ‘fruitful vine’ to the left of Elizabeth’s head:
it’s actually a sprig of holly. I know holly has Christian meanings, but I do
wonder at the substitution of spiky holly leaves for vine leaves.

In
the Book of Samuel, poor oppressed Hannah prays in the Temple – Eli the priest
thinks she is drunk, for her prayers are spoken in her heart – her mouth moves,
but she makes no sound. Her silence in prayer contrasts her to the
sharp-tongued Peninnah. The reward for her faith is the longed-for pregnancy –
she will be the mother of Samuel, whom she dedicates to the Lord who lent him.

Of
course, any woman who has endured fifteen (and possibly more) pregnancies is
entitled to have a sharp tongue and (within the general parameters of an
undeniable success at “perfection fæeminine” in regards to that divine command “crescite”) be
rather a challenge to her husband.

I have most likely over-read this monument – but it went out
of its way to invite reading, didn’t it?

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

I managed
to get along to Boxgrove Priory on Sunday, where the chantry chapel set up by
Thomas West, “eighth Baron West and ninth
Baron de la Warr” (1472–1554) is the big feature. It’s dated
to 1532, and de la Warr intended it as a final resting place for himself and
his wife, with a chantry priest to say masses for their souls in purgatory.

So far, so perfectly late-Medieval Catholic. History and
Henry VIII overtook this project: Boxgrove was abruptly dissolved as a priory. Thomas
West tried in vain to get it exempted, then settled pragmatically for retaining
the main priory building as a parish church. But even then, the long-lived de
la Warr was never to be buried in the beautiful personal shrine he'd had erected. Accused of playing a part in a
conspiracy, he had to swap his local manor house, to which the king had taken a
fancy, for a former nunnery at Whewell in Hampshire. That was the price of his
pardon for an invented crime. Leaving Sussex, he left this chapel behind him, though I imagine he wondered about having it taken apart and transported.

It had been a daring piece of work just getting the chantry
in the church and close to the altar: a whole pier was removed, with the double
size arch above it strengthened – even so, load bearing vaults no longer sweep down to approach the absent column, but splay
across almost horizontally. Everything hovers above this miracle of faith, and has
done so without trouble for nearly 500 years.

What a piece of work it is, eloquent of so much. The
decoration mixes the heraldry of the de la Warre family, Tudor roses, and
faith. It its original state, viewers must have seen a structure that ascended
up from a joyous motifs of the fleshly world – fat cherubs play lutes, two
young men swarm up one column, throwing down fruit to a girl who holds out her
apron. Hercules fights the Nemean lion, a King and Death stand either side of a
tree, dragons writhe.

Then above this, the divine realm: the riotously decorated
columns, turn into their structural negatives, niches for with saints topped with intricate
Gothic canopies. Heaven is held up by faith, not stone. Sinuous movement turns to
fixity, the contemplation of God - music might come from heaven without visible
performers, certainly not from fat-legged cherubs. All the saints disappeared,
of course: the empty niches conjure them up, spectacular victims of all that
jostling life down below them, martyred again in effigy. I imagine their
battered torsos will be in a pit somewhere close at hand, maybe dug down to the
paleo-surface where Boxgrove man and his fellows slaughtered extinct animals half a million years before.

Decorative motifs for the carvings were apparently taken
from a French Book of Hours. The lively realm of classical
motifs, images from fabliau and moral tale, and stiff Tudor roses seem to be
pushing the Gothic world higher towards heaven. Though to an extent, the elaborate coats of arms and Orders of
the Garter aspire towards joining the building’s divine realm:
angels obligingly display dynastic honours.

The intricate vaulting within makes it seem as if the masons
could extrude stone through an icing nozzle or fresh pasta maker. As decorative
as a gypsy caravan, the chantry stayed where it was and journeyed forwards
through time.

Sir Thomas Wyatt could have gone down to Chichester and seen
this structure when it was new. Anne Boleyn was about to become queen. Of its
time in its jollity, its Tudor patriotism, all of the certainties of its
theology were about to be stripped away. The double sized arch held up: the
metaphorical roof fell in.